The Peripatetic Preacher The COVID-19 Whine

I had a difficult time sleeping last night, because I was worried about whether our planned trip to Hawaii in October was going to be possible. We have reserved an AirB&B property there, after which we want to visit dear college friends who live on the Big Island. We may have to cancel that reserved property, but must do so very soon if we are not to lose a significant amount of money. We have the air tickets, but that airline is not currently running the flights we have reserved, so the shape of the trip is, pardon the expression, up in the air. What to do?

Poor us! We are joining the increasing chorus of the COVID-19 whine! And that whine is growing ever louder. While job losses mount, rents go unpaid, businesses go broke, infections grow, hospitalizations spike, and death numbers enlarge precipitously, we privileged types whine about vacation loss and shopping inconveniences. And much of that sound of the whine revolves around whether or not we should be required to wear face coverings in public. This week in West Palm Beach County, the whine was in full cry. Person after person rose to protest the mandated law that all persons wear some sort of face covering while in public. Here were some of the reasons why these dissenters rejected that demand, and the requirement that every public health official has said for months is one very significant way that the virus can be slowed, along with frequent hand washing and social distancing. One person said that wearing a mask interfered with “God’s breathing system,” and thus should not be enforced, presumably suggesting that mask wearing was anti-God. Another followed that religious claim by saying that donning a mask was “the devil’s law,” again saying that wearing a mask was not in God’s plan. A third angry person pointed at each of the members of the County Board and accused them of murder, shouting that wearing a mask actually “kills people,” though I would be hard pressed to find any medical evidence of that wild claim. The meeting was as ill informed as it was contentious, as medically vacuous as it was overtly political.

Mask wearing has turned into a political statement by the current occupant of the White House, who refuses to wear a mask in public at all. By such negative modeling, Mr. Trump opens the door to the idiocies of the Palm Beach County meeting. It is hardly a surprise that infections of the virus are leaping upward most especially in places where communities have opened their businesses the soonest and the widest: Florida, Texas, Arizona in particular. Even here in Southern California, where the lockdown was early and largely successful, our infections have spiraled upward again as gyms, hair salons, tattoo parlors, and restaurants have opened, albeit with strong statements of distancing and mask requirements. Yet, next door to me, for the previous four Saturdays, 20 or so young people have gathered for parties, male shirts off, no masks, no distancing. I doubt these folks are making any sort of political statement; they just want to have fun! They are so tired of the virus; unfortunately, as has been said, the virus is not yet tired of them.

Much of this sounds familiar to readers of the Bible, most especially in the books of Exodus and Numbers that recount the tales of Israel in the wilderness. We are told that the progenitors of the Israelites spent 400 years in slavery in the land of Egypt, but after the intervention of God, through the human agency of Moses, they were freed from their bondage and led to the land of promise. However, in the 40-year interval between their freedom from Egypt and their entry into Canaan, they wandered in the wilderness of Sinai. Any glance at a map of the area between Egypt and Israel suggests clearly that it would take very foolish and direction challenged people indeed to wander in that small space for 40 days, let alone 40 years. History is hardly the point of the story. The story instead focuses on how people react to new challenges and new dangers and often express a desire to return to the old ways, however painful those ways may have been. In the wilderness of Sinai, the newly freed people become all too soon the grumbling, complaining people.

In the Exodus account, immediately after the miracle at the Sea of Reeds, they wander three days into the wilderness and find no water. Soon, they discover a water source, but find they cannot drink it, because it is “bitter,” forcing them to name the brackish pond Marah (“bitterness” in Hebrew). They all “complain” against Moses, “What can we drink?” And Moses, in turn, cries to YHWH, who shows him a magic piece of wood that sweetens the undrinkable Marah. This forms the pattern of wandering and complaining, demanding and crying out that will characterize Israel’s time in the Sinai wilderness.

Now of course they demand food, and YHWH offers to them after their pathetic cries and their complaints against Moses manna, Hebrew for “what is it?” And now the book of Numbers adds its details of the wilderness tales by recounting that Israel soon tired of the magic manna (only so many ways it can be prepared, I guess; fried manna, anyone? Num.11:6), and demand meat. YHWH gives them a surfeit of quail, so much quail in fact that it “seeps out of their nostrils” (Num.11:20). The reason for YHWH’s fury at the pathetic, whining demands of the people may be seen at Num.11:5: “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic! But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna!” Ah, for the good old days of Egypt, they cry. But was it in fact true that their days in Egypt were filled with rich banquets of fish, seasoned with garlic and onions? We have no references to such luxuries in Egypt. There, we were told, they made bricks without straw, foraging for whatever poor food they might find. At another place, the people cry, “Would that we were back in Egypt where we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full!” Hardly! Egypt was a place of privation and hard service, but now the whining Israelites conjure up a false memory of Egypt, wishing that they could return there. The fears of the new and strange wilderness have dulled and confused them into imagining an Egypt that never was.

And now we modern American privileged ones have reverted to the Israelites of old. We refuse to wear those nasty masks; they are deadly, they are musty, they deny my rights! But all those excuses are as empty and ridiculous as the Israelite desires to return to an Egypt of their own imaginations rather than face the new world of freedom and hope promised to them by their God. COVID-19 is a new sort of wilderness, a strange and forbidding place that asks all of us to discover new ways of living with it. Mask wearing, by all medical information from respected and dedicated doctors, is one of those new requirements of living in this wilderness. Until there is a vaccine, and that may be many months from now, we are asked to wear a mask, and if we care about ourselves and particularly if we care about others, we will don that mask in public, no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how we wish we were back in some imagined Egypt where mask wearing was not required. The virus is our new reality; no one can wish it away, no one can will it away, no one, not even the president of the USA can act as if it has magically disappeared. Wear your mask in public! It is a crucial act of solidarity with humanity, not an onerous demand from some supposed governmental tyranny. We need to cease our privileged whining and get down to the business that our modern wilderness now requires of us.